Makers celebrates heroines of women’s movement

Lorena Weeks didn’t march in Washington alongside Bella Abzug and Marlo Thomas to urge passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1978.

Still, this plain-spoken Georgian who’d worked for years for Southern Bell is as much a heroine of the women’s movement as those with more familiar names.

In 1967, Weeks was passed over for promotion in favour of a male colleague. When she asked why, she was told that the job should go to a man because men were the breadwinners in the family.

“When I go through the grocery line in the grocery store with a loaf of bread,” she says in the three-hour documentary Makers: Women Who Make America, “no one says, ‘You’re a nice little lady, you can have this 10 cents cheaper’ because I’m a woman.”

You go, girl.

And go she did, filing suit against Southern Bell in 1967 and eventually winning, just like Barbara Burns, a pioneer from the outset as one of the nation’s first female coal miners, who successfully sued her employers for sexual harassment stemming from incidents in 1991.

These women are given equal prominence with women like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan in Makers, airing Tuesday on PBS at 8 p.m., because, as the filmmakers understand, the political and sociological advances that women have made in the last 50 years would not have happened without women at every level of American society participating in the call for change.

The new documentary is one of the best and most far-reaching films about the modern women’s movement. Narrated by Meryl Streep, the film is tied to Makers.com, a video project of PBS and AOL chronicling more than 1,000 stories so far of women who have made an impact on current history.

Makers is executive produced by multiple Emmy-winning broadcast TV veteran Betsy West (Nightline, 60 Minutes) and Dyllan McGee and Peter Kunhardt, who worked together on such previous films as Gloria: In Her Own Words.

Producer-director Barak Goodman (Looking for Lincoln, American Experience: Bill Clinton) employs a savvy combination of talking-head interviews with archival photography and footage. But what sets it apart from other films is that it goes well beyond the usual suspects. We get contemporary commentary from Steinem, as well as Thomas, former Rep. Pat Schroeder and Billie Jean King. But we also hear from corporate executive and former California Grand Old Party gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, authors Rita Mae Brown and Judy Blume, and Aileen Hernandez, who quit her job at the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission because issues of gender discrimination were not being taken seriously at the time.

Do you know the name Kathrine Switzer? In 1967, she did the unthinkable. Registering only as K. Switzer, she signed up to run in the Boston Marathon. Up to that point, women were not allowed to participate. Switzer’s presence so infuriated the guy who oversaw the race that he threw himself into the throng of runners, and tried to push Switzer out of the race, only to be thwarted by her boyfriend.

“I started the Boston Marathon as a girl. I finished the Boston Marathon as a grown woman,” she says now.

The film does a solid job covering known territory — Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, the 1966 ruling by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on sex discrimination, the founding of the National Organization for Women the same year, the launch of Ms. Magazine by Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin in 1972, and the losing battle for passage of the federal Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.

In each case, the film adds new perspective to familiar subjects through contemporary testimony from women who were part of history and others who benefitted by the advances.

Linda Alvarado, co-owner of the Colorado Rockies, founded her own construction company in Denver in 1976. At first, she’d go into the port-a-potties on job sites and find the walls covered with crude drawings of naked men. But she never backed down, and not only won the respect of her men, but built her business into a success that continues today.

Back in the 1950s, there was “something wrong with you” if you didn’t want to be a wife and mother, recalls Rose Garrity, who became an advocate for battered women after suffering abuse in her own marriage. It’s important to remember that while the 1964 Civil Rights Act and various legal rulings dealt with issues like discrimination in the workplace, the women’s movement had an equally significant impact on the daily lives of ordinary women, some of whom chose to remain in the traditional roles of wife and mother.

Women of every category were seeing their lives affected by new choices and freedom. The late writer/director Nora Ephron says in the film, “Our first divorce felt like a political act,” because women tended to stick it out even when a marriage went bad.

Inevitably, perhaps, the new freedoms and independence polarized some women, especially around issues of sexuality and reproductive rights. The birth control pill unquestionably brought about a sea change in American society, enabling women to make their own choices about their bodies as they’d never been able to do before.

Even more divisive was — and still is — the abortion issue. Sarah Weddington was just 26 when she stood before the Supreme Court to argue that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion if she so chose. Roe vs. Wade was decided in 1973. It continues to be a subject of fierce debate today.

Again, to its credit, Makers doesn’t focus exclusively on the female iconoclasts or major media events of the last half century. The other “side” gets equal time, not just out of fairness but because if there is one thing above all that the women’s movement should have taught us, it is that women are individuals who differ on thought, action, philosophy, politics and ambition.

Pat Larson is a nurse in Fargo, N.D., who’d never been especially political before an abortion clinic opened in her city. She has picketed the clinic for years now, and is part of the reason that the number of abortion clinics in the U.S. has been dramatically reduced, despite Roe vs. Wade.

Phyllis Schlafly, still going strong at 88, showed herself to be a master politician and organizer when the equal rights amendment seemed headed for easy passage. Not so fast, she said. She was able to keep the amendment from passing by energizing the Christian right to bolster the core of women who opposed the equal rights amendment. Once awakened, conservatives became an even more powerful force in American politics, and the defeat of the equal rights amendment began a long downward slide for the women’s movement through the ‘80s.

But something else happened to the women’s movement, the kind of thing that happens to any large social movement over time: As it made advances, there seemed less reason to keep fighting, especially among younger generations. Ms. Magazine co-founder Pogrebin is frustrated today because her daughter, Abigail, used to be a high-powered TV producer, working with the likes of Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers, as well as for 60 Minutes.

But after her first child was born, she found herself at the airport one day, ready to take yet another flight to another country on assignment, and she broke into tears. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to do it any more, try for the fabled “having it all.” She still has an active career, but she cut back on her work considerably to accommodate her home life.

Letty Pogrebin almost wonders what she did wrong, but District of Columbia Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has the answer: Nothing. Movements of any kind inevitably evolve. The cutting edge is needed, but once the frontiers have been conquered, the movement must change with changed and changing times.

Today’s women have more freedom, more protection and are making more than the 51 cents an hour to a man’s $1 that they used to make, although still not dollar for dollar. Women are in positions of power and authority in virtually every walk of American life.

The fact that Abigail Pogrebin doesn’t want to try to have it all — a demanding full-time job and a home life — also tells us something else: That she can make that choice. And that’s just one other thing she owes to her mom, and to the generations of women who came before her. Women who are Makers of history and their own lives.